In The Year of Our Lord, 1215, Pope Innocent III summoned the patriarchs, bishops, archbishops, abbots, priors, as well as the envoys of the temporal rulers of Christendom, to the Fourth Lateran Council. The object of this council was to establish, once and for all, that the bread and wine used in the Holy Sacrament, were not merely symbols of the Savior’s sacrifice on the cross, but to establish the fact that:

“The body and blood of Jesus Christ are truly contained under the appearance of bread and wine in the sacrament of the altar, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood.”

To believe otherwise would be heresy, punishable by the most agonizing execution. Nearly 500 years of religious wars, scientific intercessions and untold suffering were required to free the collective mind of Christendom from this sanguine notion.

But what if it were true, and that no belief in the notion of transubstantiation were required to maintain faith in THE FACT that Holy Communion consisted of the actual consumption of the flesh and blood of mankind’s savior, who suffered still, nailed to a crucifix beyond the shore of a dark, distant sea, as gigantic and burdened as Atlas and as long-suffering as Proteus, his back to the mountains wherein Alexander once drove the Hell-spawn of Gog and Magog, as monks dutifully collect the blood dripping from his ever-open wounds in sacral vessels, and priests carve the flesh from his bones for transport to the many churches, cathedrals, abbeys and priories of Christendom?

Beyond the Pale is an epic fantasy that has only one fantastic supposition, that which is stated above, that a giant, eternally-suffering Christ moans, staked to a mountain, for the salvation of the faithful from the unearthly, mountain-locked damnation he holds back. For the beleaguered Faithful, earthly damnation takes many forms: Tartars, Arabs, Savages, Heretics, Heathens and Northmen threatening Christendom on all sides, threats that the faithful must contend with according to their God-given means, augmented by the sacred nourishment of The Sacrament.

Thus, in The Year of Our Lord, 2212, a mere three years before—as the heretic, Hyster of Bastardy foretold—the Sacred Heart would beat its last and cast Christendom into darkness, the Savior begins to wane. On this very year, David Able Saul, a serf whelp with a clockwork mind, is plucked from a turnip patch by the rakish Rosicrucian Heshman Shew Mote, one of the seven most feared men of Christendom. With Heshman as his guide, the eleven-year old savant shall come to know the Abbeys, Priories and castles of his dreams, the very Bowels of Perdition—the stark cathedral of guilt feared by all men, the wonders of the Holy See, all in route to his ultimate goal, an audience with the titanic Savior...